This invention relates to pulsed-transmission, single-frequency echo ranging systems, and more particularly to the array used to form the received acoustic beam in very high resolution side-scanning sonars.
The principal objective of this invention is to reduce the level of grating (side)-lobes caused by spatially undersampled hydrophone arrays.
A further objective is to increase the quality of sonic images that are produced by an array having a given number of staves.
A third objective is to reduce the number of array staves needed to produce an image of given quality.